1. Field of the Invention
This invention is in general a system that enables disabled persons to transfer themselves without assistance from one location to another, especially from one elevation to another in a playground environment for using equipment otherwise inaccessible to the impaired.
2. Background Information
The American Disabilities Act of 1990(ADA 90)requires that municipal, state and federal parks and playgrounds become accessible to the disabled. Most playground equipment uses wheel chair ramps in an attempt to solve the accessibility issue of getting participants on and off playground climbing structures.
The major problem with ramps is that while disabled participants can gain with them access to elevated playground equipment, it is usually necessary to abandon a wheelchair to use the equipment. When using a slide, for one example, a disabled participant vacates the wheelchair at the ladder of the slide, climbs the ladder with great difficulty, if at all, and slides to the ground at a location removed from the wheelchair with only extremely difficult ability to return to the wheelchair without assistance.
Integrating disabled children into accessible playgrounds and playground equipment has been an intermittent and loosely defined goal for approximately one hundred years. But only since the late 1940's has there been an active movement to appropriately accommodate disabled children in playgrounds. Legislation in the 1960's and 70's initially targeted accessibility issues within the context of civil rights laws. Only with the passage of ADA 90 has accessibility finally been mandated by the U.S. Government.
The initial response to the issue of accessibility, and integration of handicapped with the able-bodied, focused on institutionalization that contained a "separate but equal" approach. Institutionalization began to give way in the 40's and 50's to the creation of a system of workshops that only dealt with simple games for recreation. The 60's and 70's saw specialized playgrounds designed for specific institutions and capabilities--focusing on activity achievement with little thought given to integration. The 80's and 90's have initiated a new era when access is the main focus.
Unfortunately, access has been limited to the root formula of moving a participant from point A to point B with little thought of the actual goal of integration. A series of long, difficult ramps is the most common approach to providing accessibility for the disabled participant. This approach, although satisfying the letter of the law, does not deal with the practicalities of true accessibility and integration for able bodied as well as disabled participants.
Past strategies and methods dealt with accessibility only by creating other barriers at different areas of play. Access should be at every point of the playground and play area and not only at the play initialization areas. Lay terms define this as an access to the play loop or path that takes a participant from one play apparatus from start to finish, then to another play apparatus and so on, returning the participant to the place of origin where a wheelchair may be parked.
Past technology only extends the play accessibility issue to the next illogical barrier, i.e. ,ramps that transport the individual to the start of a play apparatus via wheelchair but leaves the wheelchair parked at another point of the apparatus. This excessively challenges the participant to not only negotiate the next play area, but also, to retrieve the wheelchair from a remote area of abandonment. In the best known example of this approach is an "Up/Down Crawl Through" which uses an inclined plane and a "tunnel rung/handrail" to facilitate movement of an impaired person up the plane by pushing or pulling along the handrail. The plane must be only gradually inclined to prevent excessive exertion and rapid loss of interest.